The Beasts Of Valhalla by George C. Chesbro

Author:George C. Chesbro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Police Procedural, Criminologists, Mystery & Detective, Mongo (Fictitious character), New York (N.Y.), Private investigators, Hard-Boiled, General, Women Sleuths, Traditional British, Fiction, Dwarfs
ISBN: 9780967450339
Publisher: Apache Beach Publications
Published: 2011-07-24T23:49:17+00:00

23.

WE rode the rails for almost three weeks, two weeks longer than necessary, in order, as it were, to let things cool down and encourage any speculation that we might have died in the car explosion. We ate in hobo jungles, paying for our meals with a few of the gold coins I had taken from the commune. For the most part the other "bos" were friendly, and only once did Whisper have to dissuade potential thieves. During this time our symptoms did not become better; on the other hand, they didn't grow worse— and we were willing to settle for that. It gave us faint hope that the shadows in our spinal fluid were not growing larger.

We abandoned our mode of transportation when we reached Scranton, walked from the yards into the center of the city, where we found a coin dealer who was willing to put up with our smell long enough to examine our treasure with no questions asked. The coins turned out to be, literally, worth more than their weight in gold, since they were quite rare. We sold three-quarters of the bag's contents for twenty thousand dollars. We bought clothes and a few items we thought we might need for our assault on Ramdor. Then we checked into a hotel to clean up and change.

Happy time was over. With the dirt off me, I could see scales growing on the backs of my hands and feet; there were gossamer webs between all my toes, the beginnings of one between the thumb and forefinger on my left hand. We immediately checked out, bought a used van and headed for Centralia.

Viewed from the turnpike, there appeared to be a gray cloud, in an otherwise azure sky, hanging over the section of the state where Ramdor was located. It jogged my memory, and I recalled reading how Centralia, along with a large area surrounding it, was situated over hundreds of miles of coal mines and raw seams that, almost two decades before, had somehow caught fire. The underground fire still raged, eating through the black, bituminous veins and arteries of the earth like cancer. Occasionally the fire would gnaw through the skin of the earth in and around Centralia, bursting out with blastfurnace heat approaching two thousand degrees, spewing sulphur and other poisonous gases into the air; whole houses had disappeared into sinkholes that suddenly opened overnight. It was a perfectly hellish place, and we were sure the Loges felt right at home.

A few discreet inquiries around town told us that Siegfried Loge had been able to buy up hundreds of acres north of Centralia— ostensibly for a dairy farm— some three years before, at what could only be described as fire sale prices. If the owner of Ramdor occasionally lost a dairy cow or two to the natural barbecue pits riddling his property, he did not seem overly concerned. His neighbors did not care at all; their only concern was with somehow finding a buyer for their property so that they could move out.

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